New domains

(Reuters) – good.food, learn to.salsa, glossy.lipstick — people and companies will be able to set up a website with almost any address by the end of next year if they have a legitimate claim to the domain name and can pay a hefty fee.

It costs $185,000 to register for one of the new domains (typical…). I want Blogging.4U or maybe Art.4U. I want all of them. Maybe it would be worth $185,000 for all of the .4U extensions. I think big companies will snap them up and add the cost to their products. Watch out for television.coke bought by Coca Cola and I’m sure they are scheduling meetings to decide on others. They could ask me to think of some and write a report! I’m so cheap!

“It’s the biggest change I think we have seen on the Internet,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), told reporters.

“We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration.”

They will need creativity and inspiration to come up with something better than Indian.food. I could think of some! How about; Madein.England and we could follow up Producedin.England and Absolutelyscrewedin.England. The country can be changed of course.

I think short extensions may work better; we need four letter words for this! Idontgivea.toss for example! I just found out that http://sod.it actually exists! It’s an extension wasted though; sell.it isn’t even being used!

I think companies could start using their ticker symbols; Google will have a website for Chrome and use the domain http://www.chrome.goog and even http://www.search.goog and so on. Coca Cola could enhance it’s investor presence by using it’s ticker symbol and have http://www.CocaCola.ko; they already have www.coca-cola.tv in Spanish naturally… I like the ticker Heinz have; they could get the extension to match and have http://www.beanz.hnz . I think there must be funnier ones; in the UK we would like the extension .bum and I’m sure every American would like .ass!

US states could also use the abbreviations for States; for example California could have it’ own .ca extension for local websites. I suppose even chemical symbols could be used? http://www.water.h2owould be sought after! I wouldn’t like something smelly like .h2s! It’s amazing that I still remember chemical symbols after all these years. I think the porn industry should have .xxx and maybe .porn and some websites need .ru18!

3 responses

That’s cool that soon you’ll be able to make any extension you want but whoa. When they mean a hefty fee, they weren’t kidding! I don’t think I could ever put that much money down for a domain; imagine the renewal fees that would end up costing. These types of domains would probably benefit businesses more anyway. For the most part, I’m satisfied with a .net for now.

Hi Kelsey,
I got that report from Reuters this morning but France 24 made it clear i was only for large companies – seems we have had it! It would be cool if we could have what we wanted though – I’ll settle for .net too, but it limits our choices of domain name.

I see a bountiful future for lawyers as companies fight to protect their trademarks from misleading extensions! Call me a skeptic, but I fear for misleading extensions as well. I look forward to seeing how all of this shakes out and I loved your creative uses for the extensions!